Her Story
About Kaitlin
I've been working in the tech field for about 15 years now, and it's been an incredible journey. I started right out of college as a marketing coordinator, doing the same thing I do now but with less focus, and I've worked my way up to specialize in partner programs. Currently, I'm the Director of Global Field and Partner Marketing at Expel, where I've been for almost 3 years. I also handle corporate events marketing, and they're actually about to change my title to reflect all of these responsibilities. This is my third company doing partner marketing - it's a role I've consistently done throughout my career, just building more specific responsibilities during that time. When I came to Expel, I made a strategic decision to take a completely different role just to get a foot in the door instead of waiting for the right title. It was the first time in over 10 years that I'd been an individual contributor, and getting to make the shift to where I am now within 3 years is something I'm really proud of. I manage a five-person team now, and a lot of my day is responding to their questions, giving them projects where we can optimize what we're doing better, and I still own a few things on my own - like our relationships with cloud providers and alliance technologies, and creating the backbone framework of everything we do from a field partner and corporate events perspective. I've received several awards throughout my career, which has been awesome, but what's been really meaningful is receiving awards from my sales org and partner org at Expel - because marketing seeing what you're doing is great, but sales seeing what you're doing and agreeing with it is a little bit harder.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Kaitlin
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say just try to learn as much as possible. You know, I started off in a more generalized role coming out of college, not really knowing what to expect, and I figured out my focus pretty quickly - not just the partner marketing portion that I enjoyed, but the people management portion. So figuring out what you enjoy from your job and what you're good at, and what you're not good at. I've managed plenty of people who have said, I don't ever want to manage people, that is not my skill. So figuring out what you're good at and honing in on that, but also figuring out what you're not good at, and realizing that's okay to not be good at everything, and to not like everything. That would be my advice.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenges right now are the use of AI and how to use it properly, creating a balance. I'm seeing that within my own team specifically - we're encouraged to use it, and everyone's like, well, I just don't know how to start. And so once they get started, the next challenge is, well, you have to realize you have to ask questions. You can't just take it as, spit this out, it looks really nice, so it must be true. So the two challenges I'm seeing on my team, and I think are obviously bigger outside of my team, but within every single role, is how do I use it? How do I use it efficiently, and how do I double-check the data so that I'm not supplying something that's incorrect as a result? It's a really big challenge right now. I kept thinking, oh, I don't have time, I don't have time - that's what my team kept saying. And I said, take something that would take you 2 hours, and spend 20 minutes trying to figure out if you can make it more efficient. And if you do, because it can probably do it in 10 minutes, you've spent 30 minutes on a 2-hour project instead of spending 2 hours. So that's a win, and that's going to make you better at using it more efficiently, and knowing when and where to use it, and how.
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